In the last few years, a proliferation of so-called paradigm shifts
has been announced, driven by ongoing fundamental technological changes.
Amidst the plethora of theoretical approaches to literature and culture
in the post-postmodern era, shaped by increasingly sophisticated digital
and bioscientific technological resources, a few stand out as arguably
the dominant cultural developments, moving the discourse of the
Humanities beyond a postmodernist ethos: posthumanism, biopolitics and
digimodernism (1) are amongst the most salient.

As Jeffrey Nealon (2012: xii) observes, we need a "new
theoretical and methodological toolbox for responding to
post-postmodernist culture". One of the most important aspects of
the post-postmodernist turn in the Humanities is that new research
questions are being asked, entering previously little explored areas
which, as the result of judicious interdisciplinary collaboration, will
help to expand established fields and even create new ones, such as the
recent area of digital humanities (2) and the relatively recent but
already firmly established area of literature and science. (3) If we
live in post-postmodernist times, we also live in a posthuman era,
profoundly imbricated in technological advances and in particular in
biotechnologies. (4)

The concept of the posthuman conveys many distinct ideas to
different people. (5) As an umbrella term, it encompasses the wide
network of interrelated technological and bioscientific advances that
are inexorably leading to a reconfiguration of the traditional idea of
the human, increasingly technologised and decentred in a
post-anthropocentric, symbiotic world, in a progressively more marked
continuum with non-human animals and machines.

According to many thinkers, however, not only do we live in
posthuman times, but indeed have done so for a long time. The rationale
behind this notion proposes that, since there is always potentiality for
improvement and change on the physical and mental levels,
retrospectively the possibility that the human as we know it will evolve
and progress into uncharted territories has always already been here.
Indeed, the idea of the posthuman has been around at least since
Antiquity and been given visual illustration in many mythological
traditions which envisage humans like gods, possessing special physical
and psychological powers. Greek mythology is profusely populated by
hybrids of animal and humans, metamorphic beings, albeit ones whose
transformations have been effected as forms of punishment, with Tiresias
turned into a woman, Circe changing her enemies into animals or Acteon
transformed by Diana into a stag for having seen her bathing and then
killed by his hounds. Other metamorphic variants include Daphne turning
herself into a tree to avoid being raped by Apollo, or a hubristic
defiance of the gods when Icarus flies too close to the sun, despite
Daedalus's warnings, and falls to his death, his wings melted by
the heat, a cautionary tale about pushing science and bodily
augmentation too far, without proper safeguards.

These tales evoke not only the contiguity between humans and
non-human animals, but also proleptically suggest contemporary and
future medical practices, where hybrids of human and animals are used to
cure and prevent disease. While it is now commonplace to have certain
organs from pigs transplanted into humans, including pigs' cells
into human brains, pigs and mice whose brains contain human cells have
already been created, a scientific experiment that can be regarded as
transcending existing ethical barriers.

Contemporary updated versions of this potential contain a whole
gamut of possibilities, with these and many other instances of a
posthuman turn found in literature, film and the arts, (6) which thus
engage with and critique scientific practices and hubris. Hybridity,
indeed, is an increasingly important concept with which to think about
identity and biology in a biopolitical, post-postmodernist context. (7)
Hybridity between humans and animals has been extensively dramatized,
both in a biological sense and as a literary trope, in the shape of
metamorphoses which portray transitional, liminal states. In this
context, the metamorphosed body can also be described as effectively
posthuman. As influential geneticist, science popularizer and novelist
J. B. S. Haldane (1932: 96) remarked: "Pictures of the future are
myths, but myths have a very real influence in the present [...] The
time will probably come when men in general accept the future evolution
of their species as a probable fact [...] we cannot say how this idea
will affect them. We can be sure that if it is accepted, it will have
vast effects. It is the businesses of mythologists today to present that
idea. They cannot do so without combining creative imagination and
biological knowledge". (8) These imaginative visions have been
extensively dramatized in fiction and film, often providing the
blueprint and inspiration for emerging technologies.

2. The Hybrid Humanities

The proliferation of dystopian fiction since the 1990s and into the
present is symptomatic of the anxieties attendant upon ethical,
biopolitical concerns about the biosciences. One of the most exciting
and productive recent research fields, which has also impacted some
disciplines in the Humanities, is biopolitics. Indeed, it is arguably
the paradigm that has become the most influential in coming to grips
with the contemporary time and the near future, giving rise to such
areas of reflection and intervention as biopower, biomedia, bioculture
and bioart, to name only a few, areas which expand the field of enquiry
of the Humanities in fruitful and dynamic ways. In their introduction to
Biopolitics: A Reader, Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze (2013: 5) sum
this up as the "compulsion to reinterpret everything today in terms
of biopolitics". Not only is interdisciplinarity giving rise to
hybrid disciplines such as bioethics, biopolitics, biohistory and
others, which are facilitating encounters between literature, the arts
and the sciences, but one of the very products of scientific progress is
the production of hybrid creatures, foreshadowing a future in which the
distinction between the human and the non-human will be blurred, first
in the phenotype and maybe soon in the genotype.

In the context of this posthuman, biopolitical turn in the
humanities, a representative literary text that addresses many of the
current concerns in these posthuman times is Margaret
Atwood'sMaddAddam trilogy: Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the
Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013). (9) Atwood's post-apocalyptic
society in the MaddAddam books dramatizes the impact of bioscientific
advances, while addressing the divide between the sciences and the
humanities, with the latter occupying an inferior place in the context
of the overpowering technological corporations that rule the postecocide
world, divided into the gated communities of the wealthy and the
"pleeblands" (Oryx and Crake, 27). (10) Unbridled
biocapitalism characterizes this society, dominated by genetic
technologies that are steering evolution in unpredictable ways,
radically changing flora and fauna, as well as the future of humanity.
Atwood describes the trilogy as speculative fiction for, as she
explains, such fiction addresses innovations that "really could
happen but just hadn't completely happened when the authors wrote
the books" (2011). Indeed, the relevance of speculative fiction is
that it not only comments on contemporary trends, but also anticipates
future ones, by drawing on and extrapolating from technological advances
that are in the process of being developed or might be considered
feasible in a not too distant future.

2.1. "Monsters manufactured!" (The Island of Dr Moreau,
71)

Along with the mythological examples given above, which provided
inspiration for future visions of a transformed humanity, Atwood draws
on H. G. Wells's scientific romances The Time Machine (1895) and
The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) (11) as fundamental intertexts for the
MaddAddam trilogy. Atwood's "mad scientist", Crake, a
geneticist, creates new beings, the Crakers, who, deprived of some human
features, are placed on a new evolutionary path, having
"devolved", retrogressed in terms of evolution, but also,
potentially, "improved" as far as the benefits for humanity
and the planet are concerned, according to a eugenicist logic. Both the
MaddAddam trilogy and The Island of Dr Moreau, an early example of
posthumanist concerns avant la lettre, have given us some of the most
imaginatively productive future visions of posthumanity. While the Eloi
in Wells's The Time Machine can be usefully compared with the
Crakers, (12) the Beast People in The Island of Dr Moreau can also
profitably be placed alongside the Children of Crake, the humanoids that
in Atwood's speculative fiction constitute one of the versions of
posthumanity.

Entangled in a complex net of intertextual and inter-cultural
references, The Island of Dr Moreau and the MaddAddam trilogy construct
two interrelated visions of posthumanity. While in Wells's
irreverent and impious tale Moreau works on the animals to humanize
them, (13) Crake changes humans into his vision of a new species that
might rescue the planet, on the way to being destroyed by human greed
leading to ecocide. Like Crake, though in a more primitive fashion,
Moreau focuses in particular on the brain. He is described as having
"worked hard at her head and brain" (The Island of Dr Moreau,
79), to "make a rational creature of my own" (78) referring to
a puma he was turning into a woman, who, ironically, kills him. Crake,
indeed, was able to achieve one of Dr Moreau's aims, to touch the
"seat of emotions" (78), thus moulding and directing
"cravings, instincts, desires that harm humanity, a strange hidden
reservoir to burst suddenly and inundate the whole being of the creature
with anger, hate, or fear" (78). Crake manages to modify the
Crakers' brain through genetic engineering techniques, removing the
"neural complexes" (Oryx and Crake, 305) that generate
hierarchical impulses, as well as criminal and violent tendencies,
taming them in line with Moreau's ambition.

2.2. "O Walker in the Sea" (The Island of Dr Moreau, 118)

"O, Snowman, tell us about when Crake was born" (Oryx and
Crake, 104)

Despite Crake's efforts to eliminate from the brains of his
subjects the capacity to sing, dream and create alternative scenarios
for their existence, these characteristics gradually start to take over,
under the tutelage of their leader, Jimmy the Snowman. The latter plays
a similar role to Prendick in The Island of Dr Moreau, who, having been
left alone with the Beast People after Moreau's and
Montgomery's death, becomes their ruler and prophet, (14) weaving
fantastic tales about Dr Moreau watching them from above to make sure
the Rules are adhered to, and thus keeping them in check. In
Prendick's creation story, then, Moreau plays the role of Crake,
who is also said to be in the sky looking after His creatures. Indeed,
like the Crakers, the Beast Folk create their own mythological fables to
make sense of their situation, although eventually their paths unfold in
different directions: the Crakers towards greater humanity and the Beast
Folk devolving to their animal inclinations. Both novels thus imply
related conclusions: notwithstanding Crake's efforts to eliminate
the need for creation stories, the Crakers inevitably go on to want and
need them, while Moreau's attempts to condition the Beast People
not to revert to their original bestial drives also fail.

The Biblical turns of phrase and rhetoric used in both dystopias
underscore the influence The Island of Dr Moreau exerted on Atwood. Both
the Beast People and the Crakers often chant in ritualistic fashion,
having been taught by Moreau, Montgomery and Prendick, and Jimmy,
respectively. In many ways the litany of rules the Beast People intone
and are instructed to follow is akin (albeit necessarily different in
content, since the Crakers have no violent propensities) to
"Crake's rules" (7) that Jimmy instils in the Crakers.
(15) Both texts can thus be considered revisionary accounts of Biblical
creation scenes, with alternative Trinities: in Wells's case
Moreau, Montgomery and Prendick, while in Atwood's dystopia Crake,
Jimmy and Oryx constitute a more blasphemous counterpart, with the
presence of a woman in the symbolic equivalent of the Christian Trinity.

2.3. "Was he (Prendick) not made?' said the Ape Man"
(The Island of Dr Moreau, 86) Zeb "wasn't made by Oryx, not
like the rabbits. He was born" (MaddAddam, 107)

Both texts, albeit via their own and divergent satirical twists,
are also Darwinian fables, first for the Victorian age and now for our
present world. Humans come to be closely associated with non-human
animals in Atwood's biodystopia, while non-human animals become
human in Wells's, with the Crakers and the Beast People meeting
somewhere in the middle of their trajectories, to then diverge markedly.
A meaningful moment that underpins this very interconnectedness of human
and animal occurs when Prendick, coming across the Leopard Man, and
noticing his animal attitude and "its imperfectly human face
distorted with terror" (94), realizes with full force the
"fact of its humanity" (94). (16) The bestiary in the
MaddAddam trilogy, consisting of hybrids of different animals and
sometimes human tissue, is strongly reminiscent of Dr Moreau's
menagerie of domesticated beings. Many of the hybrid creatures developed
in Crake's laboratory eventually end up out of control, like Dr
Moreau's Beast People. The pink hybrid on Moreau's island and
the pink pigoons with human brain cells, also partly akin to
Moreau's Swine Men, are symbolically related creatures. Saliently,
in the economy of Atwood's dystopian fable, the humanized pigoons
become examples of "interspecies cooperation" (373).

Crake also introduces sundry animal genes into the making of the
vegetarian, innocent and trusting Crakers, genes that become translated
into enhanced physical capabilities. Oxford bioethicist Julian Savulescu
(2003: 22) suggests, considering that very possibility, that "one
might introduce animal genes from several different species into a human
embryo. The resulting entity might have unique and desirable
immunological properties or properties that render it more resistant to
disease". (17) As mentioned above, hybridity is arguably one of the
most salient features of the post-postmodernist, posthuman turn. The
Crakers already possess many non-human animal traits and the likelihood
is that the few humans left, already mating with them, may go on
producing babies that will eventually substantially differ from humans.
Indeed, at the end of the MaddAddam trilogy, three of the young women
give birth to babies who are Craker hybrids and who are described as the
"future of the human race" (380).

What is ultimately suggested in MaddAddam is that humans, even
those genetically modified in a radical manner, like the Crakers, will
nevertheless tend to become more and more human. In this respect, they
are the opposite of the Beast People in Wells's Island of Dr
Moreau, where the latter, having started as animals, revert to their
bestial nature despite Dr Moreau's efforts. After all, in the last
book of Atwood's trilogy, Toby teaches one of the Crakers,
Blackbeard, to read and write, reinforcing yet again the importance of
narrative, storytelling, reading and writing as fundamental tools for
socialization and holding communities together. On Dr Moreau's
island, similarly, one of the missionaries takes it upon himself to
teach the former's "first man" (76), made from a gorilla
(the Darwinian echoes could not be clearer), who had been moulded and
taught to speak by Dr Moreau as well as to read, together with some
"rudimentary ideas of morality" (76).

Educating and domesticating the Crakers and the Beast Folk is
clearly a priority in both tales. In this context, philosopher Peter
Sloterdijk has defended, in his "Rules for the Human Park"
(1999), the use of anthropotechniaues to evade the diminishing impact of
a humanist education, in order to "tame" citizens. His calls
for the institution of a new set of normative rules (in sharp contrast
to the postmodern rejection of a regimented society) can be interpreted
as defending the bioengineering of a gentler, more amiable and
better-natured species. If that were possible, then it would amount to
an effective change of human nature. That is precisely what Crake has
done, although in a much more radical fashion, eradicating the
possibility of violence from the brains of the bioengineered humanoids
he creates in his lab, ironically named Paradice Dome. What is at stake
in Atwood's dystopian trilogy is, accordingly, the crucial question
of what a human is, what constitutes human identity itself.

In Wells's tale, in similar fashion, Moreau explains that a
"pig may be educated" (72). According to him, there is the
"promise of a possibility of replacing old inherited instincts by
new suggestions, grafted upon or replacing the inherited fixed ideas.
Very much indeed of what we call moral education is such an artificial
modification and perversion of instinct" (73). (18) Significantly,
both Moreau and Crake have attempted to morally enhance their
manufactured creatures. Crake in particular achieved with the Crakers
what Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu (2012), amongst others, have
repeatedly hinted might be a beneficial development for humankind: moral
bioenhancement. While the contemporary trend towards human
bioenhancement seems unstoppable, dependent only on the availability of
new technologies and the individual capacity to afford them, another
type of "improvement" is being advocated by some scientists
and ethicists as vital in their effort to protect humanity and, by
extension, the planet: moral enhancement through pharmacological means
or biogenetic technologies. Controversially, Persson and Savulescu
believe that, while the science of influencing moral disposition is
still mostly speculative, it will be possible, indeed
"desirable" (2012: 416), with recourse to biotechnologies, to
"strategically influence people's moral dispositions and
behaviour" (2012: 400).

Both the MaddAddam trilogy and The Island of Dr Moreau can be seen
as compelling tales cautioning against the potential excesses of the use
of unchecked and unauthorized biotechnological breakthroughs. The
question is whether Sloterdijk's and Persson and Savulescu's
perspectives are not themselves dystopian, with their consideration of
the bio-engineering of posthumans to make them tame and obedient, indeed
on a par with Atwood's dystopian vision of the Crakers, or whether
they are the inevitable next step when humans take evolution into their
own hands.

4. Conclusion

The so-called "post-postmodernist" turn, then, has
splintered and branched into many different but often interrelated
directions, in an interdisciplinary inflection that will from now on
make up the new Humanities, forging new connections and alliances with
other research fields that will challenge earlier, more limited and
narrower practices in some Humanities disciplines. The Humanities may
aptly be renamed as the Posthumanities, since most disciplines now
gravitate around an increasingly postanthropocentric turn, questioning
and reconfiguring the human in always vexed, complex, symbiotic, but
valuable relations with cultural otherness and the nonhuman other, with
biopower and bioethics, in the context of a posthumanist turn, occupying
centre stage in the contemporary post-postmodernist landscape.

This very brief overview of some of the most representative new
trends arising in the Humanities lato sensu suggests that the
ec(h)osystems of contemporary literature and art are fluid, porous and
interconnective, in a rhizomatic interchange of concepts, methods and
valences that decisively point the way to a post-postmodern, posthuman,
biopolitical, robustly digital future for the Humanities as a whole.
These new paradigms need to be wholeheartedly embraced as offering new
vistas and explanatory frameworks, as well as novel ways of asking some
old questions and even coming up with tentative solutions.

We all have to follow rules, like the Beast Folk and the Children
of Crake, since most of us live in a version of a Sloterdijkian human
park, with its own sets of rules. We may, however, choose to modify them
or create new ones, responding to different circumstances and ethical
demands that new technologies give rise to. The novels briefly mentioned
here, chosen as illustrative instances of literature's engagement
with the main cultural tendencies and advances in technology and the
life sciences now reshaping humans and the world, centrally intervene in
the critical dialogue concerning these new trends and patterns. If
bioengineering of our moral capacities succeeds, however, or our
relationship with intelligent machines and digital technologies becomes
ever more entangled, what sort of critical post-postmodernist, posthuman
readers will we be able to be?

Wolfe, Cary 2009. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.

Maria Aline Ferreira

University of Aveiro

(1) An analysis of digimodernism falls outside the scope of this
essay. Alan Kirby's "digimodernism" (2011) constitutes a
new cultural paradigm which highlights how new digital technologies are
thoroughly reshaping our cultural landscape. An example of a
thoroughgoing critique of digimodernism is Gary Shteyngart's novel
Super Sad True Love Story (2010).

(2) Franco Moretti's "digital humanities" (2007,
2013) analyse large collections of data, with recourse to models and
algorithms which bring into relief salient trends and patterns in
literary corpora, both geographically and textually, thus generating new
perspectives with which to analyse the types of texts with which we work
in English Studies. Moretti describes this new critical paradigm as
"distant reading" as opposed to traditional "close
reading", focusing on the kind of literary analysis that takes into
account not only big data, but also a bigger picture of the literary
phenomenon, with corpora of books suggesting new paths of enquiry and
revitalizing the field with new types of evidence.

(3) For an overview of this field see Willis (2015).

(4) Biopolitics and cognitive science appear to be two of the
fastest growing areas and potentially offer the greatest range of
interdisciplinary avenues to be explored.

(6) Mads Rosendhal Thomsen (2013: 173) notes how the
"posthuman theme is not only thriving in the critical perspective
of contemporary science fiction studies, but also in new fiction".

(7) The contested notion of hybridity in post-colonial studies is
not my focus here.

(8) H. G. Wells also moves in similar terrain when, in "The
Limits of Individual Plasticity" (1895), he envisages living
creatures being moulded "into the most amazing forms [...] even
reviving the monsters of mythology, realizing the fantasies of the
taxidermist, his mermaids and what-not, in flesh and blood" (39).

(9) Salient post-postmodernist books that would also classify as
dealing with the posthuman include Jeanette Winterson's The Stone
Gods (2007), David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (2010) and Richard
Powers's Galatea 2.2 (2010), Generosity: An Enhancement (2009) and
Orfeo (2014).

(10) Atwood's trilogy can also be read as dramatizing Jeffrey
Nealon's (2012) diagnosis of an intensification and saturation of
postmodern capitalism, which now extends to areas of cultural activity
that used to have greater autonomy. For Nealon (2012: 150),
post-postmodernism "seems to take 'intensification' [...]
as its paradigmatic ethos".

(11) See Atwood's Introduction to The Island of Dr Moreau
(2005).

(12) See Ferreira (2006).

(13) In words that could be seen as commenting on Dr Moreau's
experiments, Julian Savulescu (2003: 24) writes: "Whether
transgenesis and the creation of human-animal chimeras threaten humanity
depends on what effects these changes have on the essential features of
humanity. In some cases creating chimeras or transgenic human beings
will reduce these features. But in many other cases these changes will
promote our humanity. Bringing animals closer to human beings to share
their genes might paradoxically improve our humanity, what is
essentially human."

(14) Snowman is also described like Crake's
"prophet" (104).

(15) As one of the Crakers narrates, in what can be seen as a
parallel structure of rules like that the Beast People learnt: "We
do not have battles. We do not eat a fish. We do not eat a smelly
bone" (360).

(17) Another scenario Savulescu considers is to "transfer the
gene responsible for enhanced night vision in animals such as rabbits
and owls and other nocturnal creatures into the human genome. This might
result in many benefits to the human race (2003: 22).

(18) Deeply indebted to T. H. Huxley in his "Evolution and
Ethics" lecture of 1893, Wells supports in "The Limits of
Individual Plasticity" (1895) the possibility that humans, regarded
as raw material, may be shaped and modified by means of grafting, blood
transfusion and hypnotism, techniques used by Dr Moreau to alter the
animals. Significantly, the whole quote from The Island of Dr Moreau is
taken verbatim from "The Limits of Individual Plasticity"
(39).

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